2018.05.30 01:00

I finally got a few days to really dedicate to the whole Zomp/ZX thing and wrote some docs.

If you actually click this link soon you’ll see an incomplete pile of poo, but it is a firm enough batch of poo that I can show it now, and you can get a very basic idea what this system is supposed to do:

Some pages are missing and things are still a bit self-conflicted. The problem is that until you really use a system like this a bit it is hard to know what the actual requirements need to be. So that’s been a long internal journey.

If my luck holds I’ll have something useful out in short order, though. Here’s to keeping fingers crossed and creating useful on-ramps for new programmers in desperate need of easy-to-use power tools. While we can all only hope the gods will help them when it comes to tackling their actual human-relevant problems, the environment in which they render their solutions should not be actively hostile.

My anti-comment-spam plugin called Akimset, which has saved me the trouble of reviewing about two-million spam comments over the last several months, now requires me to display a privacy notice at the bottom of all my comment-enabled posts.

The People are now Protected. Sort of like how ancestral British are now protected from the likes of Tommy Robinson. Lovely.

But in the real world, none of this matters. The TLS certificate scheme in which users of nearly every allegedly secure bit of the web base their trust is itself a sham of epic proportions. Branch prediction causes amazing things to happen if you’re running on a physical system with any code on it you don’t trust also running (oh, haha, sounds like using browsers or, especially, using the “cloud”). Don’t even get me started on what the not-as-bad “they” are going to find when they dig into out-of-order execution.

And none of this is new. It has been that way since the beginning, people are only just now finding out. Somewhat hilarious.

As always: “possession is 90% of the law”. This applies in an absolute way. Keep your important bits close, physically. Be able to point to them. Be able to point to the man who is responsible for backing it up, keeping your off-site backups, etc.

2018.05.12 15:13

I visited a behavioral psychologist friend’s home in the U.S. about a year ago. While there I got a call from someone back home. We had been speaking English but of course my phone call was in Japanese. He mentioned to me that very often when a person who speaks several languages associates a language strongly with a specific culture, place and social group that person actually changes when they switch languages for more than about a sentence. He mentioned this because he watched me closely while I was on the phone and found the Jekyll/Hyde thing interesting to observe first hand.

The whole idea seemed very odd to me at the time, but he insisted that inside of us are a bunch of different flavors of our own psyche, or several semi-conflicted psyches all cohabiting — and our external personality is a sort of amalgamated manifestation of psychological combinations we find appropriate for a given situation. Or something like this. I’m not a psychologist, so this is probably a horrible mangling of an idea he explained quite succinctly to someone (me) that doesn’t grok the first thing about this.

He went on to explain that (again, bad paraphrasing) language is the gateway to many thought processes, because at very high levels of consciousness we abstract complex ideas behind words, even in our own heads most of the time, and that unspoken context and meaning carries a lot of weight as well — but that since we cannot “hear” this context in the monologues of our mind, we just don’t give it much conscious consideration. So basically, switching languages also switches the context of your thinking to some degree, and context is how you pick which flavors of your psyche are appropriate to manifest at a given moment, and so on. So switching languages also makes you sort of switch programs in your head.

Anyway, he’s an expert, so I take this into consideration, and that was that. Fascinating idea, isn’t it?

I just realized today something interesting when a friend (who doesn’t speak Japanese) asked me “what is takoyaki” and I realized that, explained in proper English, it doesn’t sound very good. “Sort of like hushpuppies or donut-holes with pickled ginger in the batter and octopus pieces inside” is a rather unsatisfying explanation. It only gets worse if you explain what é°¹ç¯€ is (and people think how it is prepared looks like carpentry — which is only funny because it is true).

But! If I explain using a few loan words, it is great: “Like a hushpuppy with beni-shoga and tako inside!” See? No trouble.